A Companion to African Literatures

Grace A. Musilais Associate Professor in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is the author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (2015), which explores Kenyan and British interpretations of the 1988 murder of British tourist Julie Ann Ward in Maasai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya. She also co‐edited (with James Ogude and Dina Ligaga) Rethinking Eastern African Intellectual Landscapes (2012). She has written articles and chapters on Eastern and Southern African literatures and popular cultures.

Evan Maina Mwangiis Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University, and Professor Extraordinaire of English at Stellenbosch University. His books include Translation in African Contexts: Postcolonial Texts, Queer Sexuality, and Cosmopolitan Fluency (2017) and The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics (2018). His monograph in progress is on Indian Ocean cultures.

Tahia Abdel Nasseris Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles (2017) and the editor of Nasser: My Husband (2013). Her research interests include twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century literature and Arabic and Latin American literatures. She is at work on a book that examines Arab and Latin American literary and cultural exchange in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries and another book on cultural and literary ties between Palestine and Latin America.

Thengani H. Ngwenyais Associate Professor at the Durban University of Technology in South Africa where he is employed as the Director of the university’s Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT). His research interests include literary studies, higher education studies, autobiographical writing, and literary historiography.

Josiah Nyandalectures in English and Critical Thinking at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a visiting part‐time lecturer at the Great Zimbabwe University, where he teaches life writing and literary theory, and a fellow of the Literary Cultures of the Global South at Tübingen University. His areas of research interest include life writing, media studies, popular culture, and politics. His articles have appeared in such journals as Scrutiny 2 , English Studies in Africa , Social Dynamics , Shakespeare in Southern Africa , and Contracampo . He also contributed chapters to the volumes Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo of Zimbabwe: Politics, Power and Memory (ed. Sabelo Ndlovu‐Gatsheni); and While the Harvest Rots: Possessing Worlds of Kudzanai Chiurai (eds. Robert Muponde and Emma Laurence).

Mohamed‐Salah Omriis Professor of Modern Arabic and Comparative Literature and Tutorial Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford. He is member of the British Academy Advisory Panel MENA; the research networks Arab Revolutions and New Humanism; Literature and Democracy and Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation, and member of the executive committee of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA). His publications include the books Minding Borders: Resilient Divisions in Literature, the Body and the Academy (co‐edited with Nicola Gardini, Matthew Reynolds, Adriana Jacobs, and Ben Morgan, 2017); University and Society within the Context of Arab Revolutions and New Humanism (with ElKhouni and Guessoumi, 2016); Confluency (tarafud) between Trade Unionism, Culture and Revolution in Tunisia (2016); and Nationalism, Islam and World Literature (2006). He has also published several essays on comparative literature and Arabic fiction and poetry. He has special focus on the Maghreb and cultural politics in Tunisia. Omri’s latest project, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, is on authoritarianism and culture in the Arab world.

Anjali Prabhuis the Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Wellesley College, where she also teaches in the Cinema and Media Studies Program. The author of Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects and Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora , she is completing a book on eighteenth‐century British and French implication in India as it pertains to the southern kingdom of Mysore. Her articles and essays have appeared in journals such as Cinema Journal , French Forum , Diacritics , PMLA , International Journal of French and Francophone Studies , Research in African Literatures , Levinas Studies , Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy , and Comparative Literature Studies . An active member of the Modern Language Association, she has served the organization in numerous elected and nominated capacities, including on the Editorial Board of PMLA and the Program Committee. She is currently a member of the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee and the Executive Council.

Stephanie Bosch Santanais Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work, which has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, focuses on Anglophone and African‐language fiction from Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Her current book project traces an alternative history of African literary production from the mid‐twentieth century to the present by considering the way that writers have developed a range of new literary forms in periodical print and digital publications, from magazines and newspapers to Facebook. Bosch Santana’s work has been published in the Routledge Handbook to African Literatures , Research in African Literatures , the Journal of African Cultural Studies , Wasafiri , and the Johannesburg Salon . She is also an editor of the blog Africa in Words .

Neil ten Kortenaarteaches African and Caribbean literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction (2011), which examines Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka among others. His current project looks at how Nigerian novelists imagined the state and its institutions at the moment of independence.

Hélène Tissièresis guest researcher at the Global Studies Institute in Geneva. She taught at the University of Texas at Austin and was Associate Professor of African Literature and Cinema (from North and sub‐Saharan Africa). She left her position in 2016 to settle back in Geneva. In 2011, she taught at Kwara State University in Nigeria and from 2003 to 2005 at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar thanks to a Fulbright grant. She is the author of Transmigrational Writings between the Maghreb and Sub‐Saharan Africa: Literature, Orality, Visual Arts (2007/2012) and Créations et défis au Sénégal: Sembène, Diop, Diadji et Awadi (2013). Having followed the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art since 2004, she curated an homage to this event in Switzerland during the summer of 2016, exhibiting the work of some thirty established artists at the Manoir in Martigny and throughout its city. She also edited the accompanying 150‐page catalogue. She presently is working on a book that is investigating literature, film, and contemporary art from the Sahel region.

Noah Tsikais Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. He is the author of, among other books, Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora , Pink 2.0: Encoding Queer Cinema on the Internet , and Traumatic Imprints: Cinema, Military Psychiatry, and the Aftermath of War . He is a contributing editor of Africa Is a Country and is currently completing a history of film distribution and exhibition in Nigeria.